2 words I didn't expect to read in a biography of John Quincy Adams.

It took me literally a year to read James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned), but I have finally come to the end. Speaking of the end, JQA's famous last words were "This is the end of earth."

JQA:MS is not the only book I read in the past year, but it is the one I spaced out the most.

Anyway, here are 2 passages each with a surprising word that I will render in boldface:

On turning 75.

I am about to turn 75, so I was struck to arrive at this passage in James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned) — a book I've been reading on and off since my last birthday:

IN JULY 1842, ADAMS TURNED SEVENTY-FIVE. ALREADY HE HAD outlived the biblical span of threescore and ten, which Adams viewed as the age beyond which no one could reasonably expect to live. Life, he understood, was a “pilgrimage” from which he could at any moment be recalled. He had been admonishing himself for years, often on the occasion of his birthday, to prepare his soul for death. Two years earlier, on his seventy-third birthday, he had written in his diary, “I am deeply sensible of the duty of beginning in earnest to wean myself from the interests and afflictions of this world, and of preparing myself for the departure to that which is to come.” Then, almost in the next sentence, Adams made a stark admission to himself: “The truth is, I adhere to the world and all its vanities, from an impulse not altogether voluntary, and cannot, by any exercise of my will, realize that I can have but very few days left to live.”

SEVENTY-FIVE... the age beyond which no one could reasonably expect to live...

"Aside from the gold, Mr. Trump has hung more than 20 portraits in the Oval Office. In addition to Mr. Washington’s above the fireplace..."

"... portraits of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Abraham Lincoln, James Monroe and Franklin D. Roosevelt are also on the walls. Mr. Trump has ruminated about the fate of Mr. Harrison, who died shortly after he was inaugurated, to people who have visited the Oval Office. He has said that the portraits of his predecessors are there to remind him of how quickly fate can change. Most other presidents had just a few portraits or scenery paintings in the Oval...."

From "'He’s a Maximalist': Inside Trump’s Gilded Oval Office/The New York Times recreated the president’s office in 3-D, using hundreds of photos taken in October" (NYT)(gift link, for all the photos 

1. The NYT calls the photos "3-D," but they're not 3-D. They are 360°. I think the correct term is "360° panoramas."

2. This article is respectful toward Trump, an effort at objectivity, though of course the comments over there are anti-Trump — "Fool’s gold, in every sense," etc.

3. The "maximalist" characterization comes from Karoline Leavitt: "Why all the gold? 'He’s a maximalist,' Ms. Leavitt said, citing Mr. Trump’s background in real estate and hospitality. 'So he loves showing people who come in, the renovations, his office, his gift shop.'"

4. The "gift shop" isn't a shop. As the link on the phrase shows, it's a gift room, a small room off the Oval Office that Presidents have used for different purposes, that Trump uses to house a supply of hats and other items to hand out as gifts. And yes, this is the room where Bill Clinton consorted with Monica Lewinsky. 

5. I'm delighted to see the name William Henry Harrison. I was just talking about him yesterday. Off blog. I've been slowly making my way through this biography of John Quincy Adams (commission earned). I'd finally made it to Chapter 35: 

IN THE YEARS AFTER ADAMS LOST HIS BID TO BE REELECTED president, the slave states and their allies had controlled the White House, as they did the Congress and the Supreme Court.... Finally, in 1840, the Whigs had broken through, in the person not of Clay, the perennial candidate, but of William Henry Harrison. Adams was inclined to dismiss Harrison as a genial buffoon, an 'Indian fighter' like Jackson who had been puffed up into presidential material by the popular fancy for war heroes.... 

Then, on April 4, one month after taking the oath of office, Harrison died of pneumonia caused by a cold he had contracted at his inaugural. He was succeeded by John Tyler [who]... had been included as vice president in order to shore up party support in the slave states.

6. And here's the part that I clipped out and texted to Meade and to my son Chris (who reads bios of Presidents and had sent me this book):

It had never crossed anyone’s mind that he would exercise power of any sort; no president had ever died in office. No one even knew how to address the successor; the Constitution was unclear on whether the vice president would succeed to the presidency or merely assume its functions. Adams was outraged that Tyler considered himself the president and insisted on being addressed as such.

I had never seen that idea before, the notion that when a President dies, the VP does not become the President. How dare Tyler expect to be called Mr. President! 

7. But back to the present day and to Trump with that picture of William Henry Harrison hanging alongside all the far greater Presidents. Trump keeps Harrison on the wall as a memento mori. We know that because he talks about it to people. He "has ruminated" aloud about the President who's known for dropping dead. We tend not to think of Trump as a person given to rumination — about anything, certainly not death.

8. Now, looking at those pictures of the Oval Office, maximally ornamented in gold, I think perhaps he sees the place as something like a tomb. Perhaps he envisions a chamber in the soon-to-come Trump library that looks something like this:

"At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 3, with the nation still anxiously waiting to learn who its next president would be, Garfield went to bed."

"When he woke up a few hours later and was told in no uncertain terms that he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States, he was, one reporter noted with astonishment, the 'coolest man in the room.' Later that day, Garfield gave his election to the presidency little more mention in his diary than he had the progress of his oat crop a few weeks earlier. 'The news of 3 a.m.,' he wrote, 'is fully justified by the morning papers.'  In the days that followed, surrounded by celebrations and frantic plans for his administration, Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring him only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured—his time with his children, his books, and his farm—abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a 'bleak mountain' that he was obliged to ascend. Sitting down at his desk in a rare moment to himself, he tried to explain in a letter to a friend the strange sense of loss he had felt since the election. 'There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,' he wrote, 'which I can hardly explain.'"

I'm rereading "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President" (commission earned) to go along with the Netflix series — "Death by Lightning" — that's based on the book.

Why change the title to something factually inaccurate? Garfield once said "Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either."

The series is very visual, conveying information only impressionistically. Great sets, costumes, actorly finesse in the delivery of short emotional lines, but there is so much more going on in the book. That's just a typical book-is-better-than-the-film observation, not a rejection of the adaptation, which is excellent.

I'm interested in the Presidents who have not wanted to be President, who have felt bad about winning. I asked Grok to list them in the order of how much they did not want to have to do it and got this:

"[President John Quincy] Adams had very little to do save work. He had decided to follow Monroe’s example of accepting no social invitations..."

"... lest he give offense to whomever he refused. Nor did he attend political events or even harmless functions. Declining an invitation by the Maryland Department of Agriculture to attend a cattle show, Adams reflected that he ought not 'set a precedent for being claimed as an article of exhibit for all the cattle-shows throughout the nation.' Occasionally he attended lectures, such as one on 'the organ of amativeness' —the penis—which he found 'more indelicate than philosophical.' But Adams’ life was confined almost entirely to the White House; his daily round was much more dull and routine than it had been when he was secretary of state."

I'm reading "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" by James Traub (page 320)(commission earned).

I see (with the help of Grok) that John Quincy Adams wrote this in his diary for June 8, 1825:

Is President Trump's very big ballroom just for State Dinners or will there be balls?

Balls in the ballroom — what a concept! I know one time Princess Diana and John Travolta danced together at the White House. Was it a full scale ball? Where are the balls of today? It seems that we only have red carpet arrivals and then people sitting around at tables. So this passage jumped out at me as I was reading James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned)("Her" = Adams's wife, Louisa):

Her fortnightly teas became so popular that she tried to restrict the crowd by decreeing that henceforward no dancing would be permitted, but Washington society came and insisted on dancing. Washington now had a little bit of the dazzle the Adamses had known in foreign capitals. When Congress was in session, balls and fine dinners were held almost every night. The most magnificent house in Washington had been empty since its owner, Commodore Stephen Decatur, the great naval hero of the War of 1812, had been killed in a foolish duel in March 1820. But now Baron Hyde de Neuville had purchased the three-story mansion on Lafayette Square and threw splendid parties there. For a time, the Adams house was filled with music and dancing and even giggling and flirting.... A dancing master came for as much as three hours a day to teach all the young folk.

Key words: almost every night. Nowadays, it seems you only hear of balls — the dancing kind of balls (not the "Big Balls" kind of balls) — during inaugurations. I'd like to see Trump's new ballroom used for dancing, and perhaps he's the person to get people dancing. It took a person to incite all that dancing that was going on in Washington circa 1820. Of course, the person was not John Quincy Adams, and it wasn't his wife Louisa. It was Dolley Madison. 

"During remarks to employees at the American Embassy in Panama City, Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants, joked..."

"... that he’d told aides that he wanted to pay his first visit 'to a place where they speak Spanish, because I’m bilingual,' proceeding to show off his fluency in the language. Mr. Rubio acknowledged America’s complicated history with Panama, a former Colombian territory that was founded after President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, eyeing the potential for a shortcut between America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, backed breakaway separatists who declared independence in 1903. Mr. Rubio noted that the country 'was born in many ways here as a result of the interests of the United States,' and said the relationship had had its 'ups and downs.' The downs include a 1989 U.S. invasion of the country to arrest the country’s de facto ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering.... [Panama's President José Raúl] Mulino also said on Sunday that Panama, which in 2017 became the first country in the region to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure program, would not renew the agreement...."

I'm reading the NYT coverage of Marco Rubio's trip to Panama, "In Panama, Rubio Says China Threatens Canal, Demanding ‘Immediate’ Action/The secretary of state said the United States could take steps to 'protect its rights.' Panama’s leader said he was sure that President Trump wouldn’t seize the canal."

The NYT says Rubio "showed off" his fluency in Spanish and "joked" about it, as if it were an amusing side line. But it is important and tremendously useful to his role as Secretary of State. Perhaps to recognize its high value would be to impugn all the many Secretaries of State who were not fluent in Spanish.

If my research — hastily done on Grok — is correct, there was only one other Secretary of State who was fluent in Spanish. That was Henry Clay, back in the time of John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829. What about Thomas Jefferson? — you may be wondering. Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, was fluent in French, Latin, and Italian, but had only a minimal knowledge of Spanish.

"So, Trump will easily win a congressional seat in Florida if he runs in 2022. The census update likely means the GOP picks up 5+ seats in the house..."

"... to take control. And then the GOP makes Trump speaker. Then Trump has control over the legislative agenda and impeachment. Fun ensues." 

So said Tom, commenting on the first post of the day today.

I don't know if Tom is the first person to say that, but what an interesting scenario. It has happened before that a former President has gone on to serve in the House of Representatives: 

[John Quincy] Adams considered permanently retiring from public life after his 1828 defeat, and he was deeply hurt by the suicide of his son, George Washington Adams, in 1829. He was appalled by many of the Jackson administration's actions... Adams grew bored of his retirement and still felt that his career was unfinished, so he ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. His election went against the generally held opinion, shared by his own wife and youngest son, that former presidents should not run for public office. Nonetheless, he would win election to nine terms, serving from 1831 until his death in 1848. Adams and Andrew Johnson are the only former presidents to serve in Congress....

As for George Washington Adams:

American history question of the day.

In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?

I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...



... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:

I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.

In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.

Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.

Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."

I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:

After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...

As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

"[C]redulous historians have championed Jefferson and Jackson as the creators of 'our mythic democracy' — in reality..."

"...  a sham democracy driven by personal ambition, partisan corruption, and shameless pandering that disguised the powerful interests truly in charge [according to Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, in 'The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality']. The Adamses had the nerve to point out the chicanery of this racket, and for that, the authors argue, historians have dismissed them as out-of-touch, misanthropic stuffed shirts. Isenberg and Burstein want to recover and vindicate what they describe as a lost 'Adamsian' vision of a more elevated, virtuous, balanced, nonpartisan polity, so unlike the system that defeated them, the all-too-familiar forerunner of our own. By the Adamses’ standards, Trump is not an aberration. He is an exemplar of everything in our politics that they resisted in vain, especially the fraudulent party democracy that substitutes tribal loyalties and celebrity worship for informed debate. But this view of the past and the present is flawed, historically as well as politically. The Adamses were chiefly the victims not of undeserving charlatans but of their own political ineptitude. And the crisis that has given us Donald Trump has arisen not from the excesses of a party politics the Adamses despised, but from the deterioration of the parties over recent decades.... Trump is not a creature of the party politics pioneered by Jefferson and Jackson. He is its antithesis, a would-be strongman who captured the presidency by demonizing party politics as a sham. He will be stopped only if the Democrats can mount a reinvigorated, disciplined party opposition. In that struggle, the Adamsian tradition is at best useless and at worst a harmful distraction."

Writes Sean Wilentz in "The Problem With High-Minded Politics/John Adams and John Quincy Adams’s virtuous disdain for partisanship was at the root of their failures" (The Atlantic).

Whither "the man in the street" and "John Q. Public"?

The other day, talking to Meade, I made the stray observation: "Nobody says 'the man in the street' anymore."

It was a common colloquialism in news reports years ago. It's hard to take note of when something stops getting said. Decades could pass before you notice that something has disappeared from the language. Maybe the death of "the man in the street" began in the 1970s, with the success of the women's movement, as it became less and less possible for mainstream folks to convince themselves that "man" includes woman. Perhaps there was a transitional period in which reporters — perhaps literally in the street with their microphones seeking random comments from passersby — said "the man — or woman — in the street," before that got old and sounded corny and then nobody ever said it again.

Yesterday, Meade and I were watching "Jeopardy!" It's "College Championship" time and all the players are college students. The board full of answers in need of questions is stocked with things that younger people know — pop singers, movie superheroes, school-level math, history, and science and so forth. The kids buzz in and get many questions right. But yesterday, they had an answer that drew absolutely vacant stares and even puzzlement when Alex Trebek revealed the question. The answer was: The middle initial of John Public. The question: What is Q? I laughed a lot, because I could see that from the kids' perspective, that was just some weird nonsense.

Nobody says "John Q. Public" anymore. Like "man in the street," the term embodies the general  public in a single person. This time, that person has a name, John Q. Public. I'm going to assume, it's gone away because we won't accept the idea that the public can be personified as a male, and that also means the whole idea of the general public as one person just doesn't work anymore. If there was ever a period when people adapted to changing times by saying, cutesily,  "John Q. — and Jane Q. — Public," I missed it.

Now, it just seems goofy, I suppose, to people who don't remember the common usage, to hear that John Public has a middle initial and it's Q. What's the Q for? From the OED:

1937   N. & Q. 6 Mar. 177/2   ‘John Citizen’..is not so frequent in American usage as ‘John Q. Public’... It is probably a play on the name of an early president, John Q(uincy) Adams.

I think it's more like Jesus H. Christ. An initial just seems funny. And if you want funny, there's no funnier letter than Q.

As for Jesus H. Christ, well, what's that about? Hilariously, there's a Wikipedia entry for Jesus H. Christ — which, you may realize, is "a vulgarism" that "is not used in the context of Christian worship." Mark Twain referred to it in his autobiography as typical of "the common swearers of the region," so the usage goes way back. Some people attribute it to "the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus (Ἰησοῦς)... transliterated iota-eta-sigma, which can look like IHS." There's also an idea that the H is for Harold — from mishearing "hallowed be thy name" the Lord's Prayer as Harold be thy name.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said "Monty Python had man in the street segments":

The best and worst of the NYT article about the best and worst of the U.S. Presidents in their post-presidential phase.

BEST: cool illustrations (of John Quincy Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.); appropriate selection criteria (do good work, don't undermine your successors, etc.); actually saying something nice about Nixon (a "purposeful post-presidency," becoming a "respected elder statesman").

WORST: Acting like they're offering help to Obama (who's "deeply engaged in his presidency," but must be thinking about his post-presidency), when the subject obviously came up because of Hillary Clinton and her ex-president spouse coming in for criticism for their grandiose and lucrative posturings in the direction of great good work.

Obama announces his retirement from politics.

I received email from the President just now. The subject line: My last campaign.

Ann --

In a few days, I'll be hitting the trail for my last campaign.

[Blah.. blah... request for donation omitted.]

Thanks,

Barack

His last campaign?

The man is 50 years old. His career is young. He's packing it in so early? This troubles me. Why no more stamina in the political arena?

I mean, what if he loses in November? He could run again. He could let 3 presidential terms pass and come back and only be as old as Romney is right now!

But even if he wins, what's he going to do? He can't run for President again, but there are other elective offices. Look at John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, and Andrew Johnson. All of them went on to seek other elective office and to win.

(Also at that link: the names of the 7 Presidents who sought the presidency after they were out of office. You probably know the name of the individual who won, but do you know the 6 who tried and failed?)

Why doesn't Obama have more gumption? It makes him seem too weak even now as he seeks reelection. Last campaign. That's annoying.

You know, the first time I ever voted for a Republican, it was 1976 and I decided I couldn't vote for Carter. It was one thing that he said that turned me against him. He was asked — very shortly before election day — what he would do if he lost. He said he'd go back to his peanut farm and be a farmer. I didn't like that. I thought: Not much of a statesman.